I'm trying to use Salome-MECA for meshing a ship. I've search all over the net and posted on Salome forum but I've hit a dead end.

Has anyone here used Salome-MECA to create hex. mesh for external 3D flows?

I have gone through all the tutorials and I'm really familiar with the GUI (and TUI for automatic geometry generation), but I just can't mesh a ship or anything with external 3D flow. Tetrahedron mesh is really not a problem, but hex is a big one.

Thank you, I've studied these, but they are not related to my problem at all.

As I have written in my latter post, the problem is meshing external 3d flows. I have already done complicated 2D hex meshes of S60 ship hull, but I have problems creating 3D hex meshes for external flows. So, if anyone has used Salome to generate 3D mesh for external flow please let me know, I'm having problems in this area.

Create a 2D tet mesh for all the patches (just as you have before just without volume mesh and no 2d hex) and then right-click the mesh and export to STL.

Then use the STL in engrid and create a prismatic boundary mesh where your hull is. Do this right and you will get as good results, since the prismatic boundary mesh captures the BL (guessing that's what you want) as good as Hexes.

Engrid has the possibility to export directly to OpenFOAM and even with polyhedra mesh, and polys give a good solution from my experience.

So you will have a prismatic BL at the patches you choose in engrid and you get the nice polyhedra cells in the volume = win-win :-)

Another option: use Salome to create your geometry, export the patches in STL format (you can do it already in the Geometry module, no need to use the Mesh module), and use snappyHexMesh to create your hex/poly mesh.

I think sHM doesnt work like that. It uses a blockMesh background mesh to define the surface mesh. Moreover, you can really refine the surface mesh, you even have a section for that in snappyHexMeshDict. Look in the User Guide for a more detailed description.

There are problems with snappy and ships. I'm actually working on ship simulations with two colleagues and they have tried using snappy for generating the mesh around the ship for a while and they had lots of problems with it. That's why I decided to try and use Salome or something other than snappy, and if I succeed in generating a good mesh, then we would all use that software.

I have used the .deb package reluctantly and it worked! I like to keep my applications local, especially when they are not listed in the official repos. I'll try and create the mesh now. Thank you both very much for your advice.

I have managed to create a 2D tet mesh of ship and domain faces in Salome.

Now I'm trying to import .stl in engrid, but there's nothing on the screen (even after I click redraw), and information bar on the bottom of the window states 0 mesh elements (both 2D and 3D). Am I doing something wrong? Is there some option to set in Salome? I only clicked "Import STL" and selected the .stl file.

in the engrid output screen. Now, I had to manipulate the mesh by hand an create two additional triangles, because this kind of meshing in Salome gave me two/three really deformed triangles at the bow and stern corner of the deck face.